DWCS 90 predictions: five contracts, two model upsets

Dana White's Contender Series 90 runs tonight from the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, five fights, first bell at 7:00 pm ET (4:00 pm PT, midnight in London, 1:00 am Wednesday in Paris). No belts, no rankings, no co-main, just ten people fighting for the only thing that matters on a Tuesday in September: a UFC contract handed out live from cageside.

Eight of the ten have exactly one professional loss. One has none you would call recent. And one of them is 34, which on this show is a different category of problem entirely.

Our model prices all five bouts, and it disagrees with the obvious read twice. Here is the card, top to bottom.

Charlie Cleveland vs Gabriel Lorenço, heavyweight

Charlie Cleveland (6-1) is 28 and American. Gabriel Lorenço (7-1) is 26 and Brazilian, and on paper he is the slightly more accomplished of the two: one more win, the same single loss, and the better underlying numbers on almost every career metric we track.

The model still gives Cleveland 60.9%, and it does it on situational grounds rather than on résumé. That is the polite way of saying the model likes the shape of the matchup more than it likes either man's record, which is roughly where I land too. Heavyweight on the Contender Series is a genre unto itself: nobody has fought a full three rounds recently, everybody hits hard enough to end it, and the first man to land clean usually goes home with the contract.

Prediction: Cleveland by TKO, round 1.

Brandon Holmes vs Modestino Rodrigues, middleweight

The age gap is the fight. Brandon Holmes is 29 and 6-1. Modestino Rodrigues is 22, which is remarkable given he is already 7-1, and he was born in October 2003, more than five years after Chuck Liddell won his first UFC fight at UFC 17.

The model gives Holmes 60.9%, and it gets there in an interesting way: it rates Rodrigues higher on level of competition, then overrides that on the pre-promotion profile, where Holmes grades out cleanly and Rodrigues does not. Seven wins by 22 means a lot of quick turnarounds against a lot of people who were also 22.

I will take the number, with a caveat. Rodrigues is exactly the kind of prospect these shows exist to find, and if he wins this he is the most interesting man on the card by a mile.

Prediction: Holmes by decision.

Adam Livingston vs Hunter Smith, lightweight

The model's most confident pick of the night, and its cleanest. Adam Livingston (7-1) is 25, Hunter Smith (8-1) is 27, and the model has Livingston at 67.8% on a combination of competition level and age curve. Both men are inside prime by our aging model, but Livingston is nearly three years further from the edge of it.

Smith has the extra win and I suspect he will be the marginal favorite in whatever lines appear before the broadcast. That is usually how it goes when one man's record has a bigger number in it. If you want the one spot on this card where our numbers and the market are most likely to part company, this is it.

Prediction: Livingston by decision.

Liam McCracken vs Silvestre Sanchez, lightweight

First of the two upsets, and the tighter one. Liam McCracken (8-1) is a 25-year-old Englishman. Silvestre Sanchez (9-1) is a 24-year-old Mexican, and the model gives him 53.4%, essentially a coin flip that leans his way on strength of opposition.

Nine and one at 24 is the best raw line on the card. It is also the kind of line that gets built in exactly the sort of regional environment the Contender Series is designed to test, so I would not read it as gospel. What I would read is the closeness: 53.4% is our model saying it genuinely does not know, and on a five-fight card where four of the bouts have a clear lean, the one it cannot separate is usually the one worth watching.

Prediction: Sanchez by split decision.

Patrick Rivera vs Adam Darby, welterweight

And here is the fight that made me want to write this up at all.

Patrick Rivera is 13-4 and 34 years old. He is comfortably the most experienced fighter on the card, seventeen professional bouts against a field where nobody else has more than ten, and on the Contender Series that experience usually reads as an advantage. Dana White has handed out plenty of contracts to the veteran in a matchup like this.

Our model wants nothing to do with it. It gives Adam Darby (7-1, 27 years old, Irish) 60%, and the single largest driver in the entire fight is age: it has Rivera at 34.5 years old and roughly a year and a half past the peak of his curve, against a Darby who sits squarely inside his. The competition-level split leans Darby too, and so does the loss column, four against one.

This is the model saying something the eye test tends to resist. Seventeen fights of professional experience is real, and it wins plenty of these. But the Contender Series is not a place where craft accumulates value, it is a place where somebody has ten minutes to look like a UFC fighter in front of the man writing the checks, and the 27-year-old with one loss is usually better equipped for that than the 34-year-old with four.

Prediction: Darby by TKO, round 2.

What last week looked like

Contender Series 89 went four finishes in five fights: Guilherme Uriel guillotined Mario Piazzon in the first, Ronald Humphrey took Alexis Miranda's back for a rear-naked choke in the first, Nick Galanti knocked Carlos Petruzzella out in the first, and Sean Clancy Jr. stopped Gary Balletto Jr. with elbows in the second. The main event, Alex Apodaca against Bella Mir, went the distance and every judge scored it 29-28.

Four first- or second-round finishes out of five is the format working as designed. Nobody on this show is being paid to point-fight, because nobody on this show gets a contract for winning 29-28 unless the 29-28 is spectacular.

Join us for the card tonight. If you want to put your own numbers up against ours, the picks page for DWCS 90 is open until first bell.